Re: Update - Variation of secondary Q experiment

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Paul Nicholson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <paul-at-abelian.demon.co.uk>

Terry wrote:
> Somehow we will pull the weather data off the little station
> across the street

No problem. I wrote a little shell script to grab the data from
the Fort Collins site.  You just give it year, month, day, hour
and minute, and it comes back with the temperature and humidity.

To save hammering their site, the script locally caches a days
worth of weather data, so that subsequent requests for the same
date only need go as far as the local filesystem.

I'll install this on your Sun workstation this evening.

BTW, everything is in MST.  Relies on the raw data file time stamps
being applied properly at source, ie your NT laptop.

> Probably to hot-streamer-dot-com since it has nice FTP and
> web server connections.

> Then the data will be picked up on the big Sun workstation.  

Yup, that bit is already working fine.  But if we can get the Sun's
SMB server (samba) to export the filesystem /export/home/qvar/data
then it will save going via hot-streamer-dot-com.  Your NT laptop can
then map this filesystem to a 'drive letter' (Ugh, shudder) and thus
the captured trace files can be dropped straight into the Sun to be
pickup up automatically by the reduction program.  With suitable
setup of samba that would eliminate NT time stamping problems.  The
Sun should be able to use ntpd to synchronise to a network time
service, if necessary.

> It's like 75 degrees here today so those 65 to 10 degree days
> or going fast

Yes, although you're still getting some nice variations.  I watched
yout temp change by nearly 15 deg F in less than an hour the other
night!

> for when Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly shreds Microsoft

Ah, we all look forward to the day the evil empire is dismantled.
Then folks at home and in their offices will be able to see what
a modern computer can really do!  Hopefully Bill will be made to
pay back all the little people he's ripped off - with interest!!

> http://hot-streamer-dot-com/tssp/3-30/sun.jpg

Nice. The standard tool for any serious researcher.  Not quite as
easy to use as say, Linux, but very solid and powerful.

> also gets me learning the UNIX stuff

Er, considering the apparent ease with which you've been installing
various software packages, it looks like you've got that unix stuff
well in hand.  I was still trying to figure out how to install gcc
on a Sun when you wrote to say it was done!

> It's turning into a quite complex thing :-))

I'd say it's not too bad for complexity (having seen a lot worse!).
Metrologically it's very simple - nothing to drift or calibrate! 
Data processing wise it's also pretty straightforward.  This should
make for a very solid setup (net of any NT reliability problems!) 

Adding to Terry's comments, the plan at the moment is just to get
the experiment running on the two coils and see what the trends
are.  Then we can embark on a process of elimination to try to
identify the sources and causes of variation.
--
Paul Nicholson
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